


a portrait of my daughters in gold

by someryn



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: But Also Life, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Motherhood, Post-Breaking Dawn, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:08:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26934112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someryn/pseuds/someryn
Summary: Life goes on for the humans left behind. A story of Renee, before and after Bella. And after. Gen.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27





	a portrait of my daughters in gold

Renee Swan née Higginbotham tried to be a good mother, she really did.

It wasn’t her daughter’s fault that she had been born half a decade before Renee even wanted to _think_ about kids, that before Renee had had more than a few months to enjoy married life, she and Charlie were planning their grocery lists around weekly coupon mailers and canceling their honeymoon to Alaska indefinitely for an inconveniently timed baby.

It wasn’t her daughter’s fault that Renee and Charlie could hardly go a week without having a major meltdown, leaving Renee struggling to figure out what had happened to the sweet, easy-going man she had married.

It wasn’t her daughter’s fault that the day Renee had almost broken two fingers trying to un-jam the car seat from her two-decades-old pickup truck was also the day that Charlie came home reeking of whiskey and crying, asking her if she was cheating on him, because she never initiated anything romantic with him anymore.

And it _really_ wasn’t her daughter’s fault that, after Renee had slapped Charlie and grabbed her purse, she’d hesitated at her daughter’s crib, looking down at her sleeping baby.

Charlie was, if he was nothing else, a caring father, and he’d have Sarah Black and Sue Clearwater to help raise her…

But she could imagine their faces. _That woman isn’t just a waste of space, a floozy who walked out on her husband, she walked out on her_ baby _._ Renee couldn’t stand to prove them right.

And so it was out of more guilt than instinct that she threw her diaper bag over her shoulder and reached inside the crib.

“You can’t just _take_ Isabella,” Charlie protested, stumbling behind her as he followed her out the front door. “I’ve got rights, Renee. She’s my daughter, too.”

“The court can settle the details,” Renee said, not turning to look at him. “But for now, she’s coming with me. And her name,” she added impulsively, because she’d always hated giving in to Charlie’s choice on her own damn daughter’s name, “is _Bella_.”

* * *

The years are years, with good times and bad.

Renee's parents live in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs of Phoenix, with acres between them and the next house. Her gruff, silver-haired father barely blinks when she shows up in her old Chevy at close to midnight, Bella blinking awake in her arms.

He leads back to her childhood bedroom and tells her things will look better in the morning.

They don’t, though, so Renee sends Charlie divorce papers. The stupidly long legal pages say things like, “the child’s father,” and “the child’s mother,” and they aren’t names, they aren’t Charlie-and-Renee anymore, they’re descriptions of biological relations to an eight-month-old printed in monospaced type.

Charlie cries on the phone when she calls so he can talk to Bella and listen to her gurgles, and he says _can we talk about this_ and _I’ll never get over you_ and _I didn't mean what I said_ and _please come home_.

When she finally extricates herself from the latest conversation, she carries Bella outside to the front porch and inhales deeply: sage and sand are in the air and the sun is a white-hot ball overhead, the sky blue like cornflower and the clouds floating by as delicately as dandelion seeds.

What Charlie has never understood is that Forks was never her home.

* * *

When Renee is twenty-four, her mother trips in the kitchen and hits her head against the new granite countertops she just installed. She lies in a coma, her brain function steadily slowing down, for two weeks until she slips away in the night.

Renee’s father passes just six months later, cancer from fifty years of Camels poisoning his lungs. He refuses to even try treatment, just sits in the recliner downstairs with old picture albums, taking naps with his granddaughter curled up against his chest, somberly watching _Sesame Street_ and _Barney_. He looks at Renee with distant eyes and sometimes addresses her by her mother’s name.

Renee inherits the house, and a small sum left over after the funeral and medical bills. But now the utility bills and property taxes come addressed to her, and her dad’s pension that used to pay for all of the household expenses is gone. A quarter-century old, and she’s finally going to have to grow up.

She’s not entirely sure how to take care of herself, but what really matters is figuring out how to take care of Bella.

She goes to the library and checks out a thick reference book on careers. She always hated school, mostly because she was never very good at any of her classes. Nothing has ever made her want to stay up late and learn everything about it, not chemistry or history or bird-watching or curing world hunger. She’s always thought of herself as wanderer, a free spirit. But _immature_ is probably better word for what she is, she knows now.

 _List out_ _your interests,_ the book insists.

“Bella is my only interest,” she informs it. Then she sees a chapter titled “Elementary School Education.”

* * *

Renee doesn’t love teaching, but then, she’s not sure she loves much of anything except her daughter. She takes out loans to pay for classes at the local state school, Bella playing on the rug at her feet while she studies in the living room.

By the time Bella is old enough to start first grade, Renee Swan is a licensed elementary school teacher in the state of Arizona. She signs a contract to teach fourth grade at a school ten miles away, and applies for an exception to enroll Bella there, too.

Some days over her lunch period, she walks downstairs to Bella’s classroom to eat lunch in a tiny plastic chair beside her.

Bella always smiles at her, says, “Hi, Mommy,” and goes back to her food. The teacher tells Renee she isn’t any more talkative at school among her classmates than she is at home.

Healthy kids talk, Renee is sure of it. She wishes there’d been a lesson on _this_ in her college classes.

 _Did I break her?_ she wonders. _Have I ruined my baby already?_

When she puts Bella on the plane the following summer at seven, she almost changes her mind and doesn’t let Bella go. But her daughter deserves to know her father. Renee’s anger and resentment have faded over the years into a scar that rarely aches, and Charlie is a good man.

The morning after Bella arrives at Forks, Renee calls him to ask if Bella is talking.

“’Course she talks, Renee,” he says, sounding surprised. “Not a whole lot, but when she’s got something to say, she says it. Told me about all the books she wants to get at the library tomorrow, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh,” Renee says in a tiny voice.

Charlie continues when she doesn't say anything else. “You just gotta give her the space to breathe, give her a chance to think first. If you try to force her, she won’t say nothin’ at all.”

Renee is positive there’s nothing she likes less than receiving parenting advice from her ex-husband.

Except maybe the suspicion that he’s right.

* * *

Then there is a man.

Renee is thirty-eight and she’d never thought there would be a man again. But Phil is cheerful and outgoing and ambitious and lighthearted. He’s everything Charlie Swan could never be.

And Bella seems happy, she smiles, she hugs Phil, she’s Renee’s maid of honor.

But then she is saying _Forks, Dad, moving, finish high school, I want to, Mom, I want to._

Renee doesn’t understand, but with her daughter that’s not really anything new.

 _Call me if you need me_ , she tells Bella when she drops her off at the gate. _I’ll come._

But her daughter doesn’t call, and Renee wishes she were more surprised by that.

* * *

Bella has been gone for almost a year when Renee receives the email.

 _Mom_ , it starts, and the tears start before Renee can read another word.

_I wanted to let you know that I'm alive and safe._

_But I'll never be able to see you again, for reasons I can’t explain. However, I can remain in contact with you through email if you swear you will never tell anyone else about our correspondence. Not even Phil._

_I’m so sorry to put you in this position, but please believe me when I say that your life, mine, and the life of anyone you told would immediately be placed in danger if they knew that I was in contact with you. My enemies are more powerful than you can imagine._

_If you can promise me that our communication will remain a complete secret, please write me back._

_Either way, know that I love you forever._

_Your daughter,_

_Bella_

It takes Renee about twenty minutes to read through the brief email, because the tears keep coming and blurring her vision. Her missing-presumed-dead daughter is _alive_.

She frowns down at the email again, rubbing her tears away. Her daughter disappeared just before her nineteenth birthday. How does an eighteen-year-old girl living in rural Washington make such powerful enemies?

Her stomach contracts, and she rubs her protruding belly soothingly. She has _two_ daughters now, even if her soon-to-be-born Eliza will never know her older sister.

* * *

Renee feels like she is living a double life as the years pass. Her fortieth birthday is days away when she gives birth to Eliza, and her obstetrician advises her not to try for another child. She doesn’t argue, and Phil gets a vasectomy a few days later.

Her husband is a good father. He retires from baseball, accepting that he was a good minor league player and might see the bench of a major league game, but probably never the pitching mound.

They buy a pretty house outside of Tampa and Phil accepts a job as an assistant coach for the university’s baseball team. Renee stays home with Eliza and hosts playgroups with the other neighborhood moms. She is the suburban housewife she never got to be with Bella, and she feels guilty, both for how much she enjoys it and that she never could offer it to her first daughter.

After Eliza’s bedtime, she and Phil curl up in their big bed and talk about their day.

Phil was worried at first that she wouldn’t be able to handle having another child with one missing. She will probably feel guilty for the rest of her life for letting him think that Bella is dead, but if that is the price she must pay for getting to talk to her older daughter, she will pay it willingly. He is a good man, though, genuinely pained about losing his stepdaughter and especially thoughtful to her around Bella’s birthday and Christmas.

Renee kisses him when he looks at her with worry in his eyes and reminds him she loves him and Eliza more than life itself.

She knows she can’t always keep the grief from her eyes, but she hopes her husband and daughter see her love for them, too.

* * *

A few days after they bring Eliza home from the hospital, Renee writes Bella to tell her that she has a little sister now.

Bella replies with heartfelt congratulations and to tell her that she is pregnant.

Phil is about to be home, so Renee puts Eliza in her stroller and takes a long walk toward the beach, wearing oversized sunglasses so people can’t see the tears in her eyes.

Her baby is going to have a baby. She is going to be a grandmother, and she’ll never get to know her grandchild.

Fury overtakes her suddenly. How _dare_ Bella put her in this position? How can her daughter be so cruel, to tell her of a grandchild she will never get to meet?

 _Bella didn’t have to tell you at all,_ her rational side says. _She never had to contact you in the first place. It puts her in danger, but she’s risking it so you wouldn’t think she was dead. Isn’t it better to know?_

She knows she would never sacrifice knowing that Bella is alive to save herself the pain of knowing what she can't have.

It doesn’t make the knowing hurt any less, though.

* * *

Six months later, Renee receives another email. The message says only:

_Renesmee. In honor of Edward’s mother and mine._

There are half a dozen images attached, of a newborn baby with a tuft of bright copper hair, sleeping and crying.

Renee notices there are no pictures of Bella or anyone else in the photos, but she doesn’t say anything to Bella. She looks up how to encrypt her hard drive and creates a password-locked folder to save the pictures of her granddaughter.

Bella sends her emails about once a month. Renesmee smiling, Renesmee eating, Renesmee playing with wooden blocks.

 _Love this girl_ , Renee finds herself replying one day. _Love her just because she’s yours._

Bella responds with another photo. She is holding a chubby six-month-old Renesmee up to the camera, and Bella is actually in this picture, barely in the frame. Out of focus and blurred as she is, she is still _there,_ still _alive_ , and Renee can tell that her daughter is smiling.

* * *

When Eliza is five, goes back Renee to teaching elementary school. She comes home from work one day tired and grumpy.

Eliza and Phil are out at a pizza restaurant they love, but Renee has begged out for the night. Today was parent-teacher conference day, and nothing drains her more than parents defending their children and criticizing her for not being able to fix five years’ worth of subpar schooling in one school year with her.

Still, she drops her bags on the kitchen table and opens her laptop to check her email before she goes upstairs, as she does almost every night. This time, there is an email from Bella with an attachment that isn’t an image.

All Bella has written is, “A surprise from Renesmee.”

Renee opens the file, and her video player pops up. There is a pause, then a crackling sound comes through her speakers.

Her screen is filled with the face that she immediately recognizes, not only because of the many pictures that Bella has sent her, but because she can see her daughter in this child’s face. Her hair is long enough to fall in soft waves down to her shoulders, and her eyes are huge and dark in a pale face.

“Okay, Renesmee,” Renee can hear her daughter saying in the background. “You can go now. Sing for Grandma.”

Renesmee smiles hugely at the camera. “Okay! I’ve got a song for you, Grandma!”

In a high voice, she sings Happy Birthday to Renee. Renee smiles at the video like Renesmee can see her.

When she finishes, she leans forward and kisses the camera. “I love you, Gram, bye-bye!” Then she pushes herself away from the table with the energy only a four-year-old can have and runs off-camera.

Bella chuckles in the background and leans into the frame. The screen blurs, though, and Renee can’t see her any more clearly than she could in that single out-of-focus picture she has from years ago. “Sorry about that, Mom,” Bella says, and her voice sounds a little different, almost chiming. Renee supposes it’s a little distorted by the recording. “She’s at the age where she never sits still. Anyway, I know it’s a little early, but I didn’t want it to interfere with your family plans. Have a great birthday. I love you.”

The screen goes black. Renee plays it four more times before she turns it off, deleting and purging the email just like Bella has told her to.

Wiping her tears dry, she greets Phil and Eliza at the door, kissing her husband and promising their daughter a trip to the bookstore the next day. She’s so like the older sister she’ll never meet.

Renee’s secrets are painful to carry, but they are worth any price.

* * *

Renee is almost eighty when she trips walking through the doorway of the retirement condo she shares with Phil. The fall fractures her hip, leaving her to take her first ever ride in an ambulance and visit the hospital for the first time since she had Eliza.

The fracture is tiny, the doctor tells her, which is good as she can hope for. A few weeks of bed rest and she should be able to sit up in a wheelchair, then hopefully progress to a walker.

Phil, at seventy, is still tall and hearty and has only just retired from coaching baseball. Having him at her bedside makes her feel both better and like she’s thirty years older than him instead of ten.

Eliza works sixty-hour weeks as a social worker in Orlando, but she still offers to drop everything and come stay with Renee until she is feeling better.

Renee refuses, and Eliza finally gives in. Renee will come and stay with Eliza in a few weeks like she does every spring, and there is no need for her daughter to disrupt her life any further. Eliza promises to clear out an entire week for them to spend time together when Renee comes to visit.

Then Renee contracts pneumonia, and things suddenly don’t seem so rosy. The doctors who were previously saying she should be able to go home soon move her to a more isolated ward, and they’re having quiet, serious discussions with her and Phil about risks and treatment options.

They give her painkillers intravenously to dull the pain in her chest, but she doesn’t like taking much, because they make her sleep for hours. Her temperature rises and her blood pressure is lower than it’s ever been in her life, and no one can seem to find anything that works to correct either problem.

Eliza walks into her hospital room the morning after she is moved to the ICU. She is red-eyed over the surgical mask visitors have to wear. “How are you feeling, Mom?” she asks. She straightens one of Renee’s blankets, and her hands are shaking almost as much as Renee’s.

“Oh, I’ve been better, sweetheart,” Renee says, smiling at her daughter. She is careful to focus on their conversation, not to multitask and let her mind flutter in a million directions at once like she has all her life. Her doctors warned her that she might get confused easily from the medication, and she wants to make sure that she’s not wasting the time she has left to talk to her loved ones.

She also knows she must be very careful to never slip up and mention Bella or Renesmee (not even to _think_ of them would be better, but how is she not supposed to think of one of her children and her only grandchild on her deathbed?) She hopes that if she does mention them, the nurses will just think she is a dying woman hallucinating her dead daughter.

Phil returns an hour later, wrapping his arms around Eliza's shoulders in a half hug. He is rarely away from Renee’s bedside. He tries to coax her to drink some soup, but her appetite is so far gone that even the thought of eating makes her nauseous.

The next day, a nurse hooks up a milky white bag Renee hasn’t seen before. “Intravenous nutrition,” the nurse explains when Phil asks. “Since Mrs. Dwyer isn’t feeling up to eating right now.”

Despite the woman’s cheerful tone, Phil looks away quickly. Renee sees the tears in his eyes anyway.

After the nurse leaves, Renee coaxes Phil to go home and take a shower while she naps. She sleeps so often these days, but she always seems to need more.

She drifts off into a light sleep, and then she hears a soft voice, melodic and unfamiliar but with an undercurrent of the quiet voice she knows better than her own heartbeat. Eliza is standing in the doorway, talking to someone Renee can’t see fully, but she knows immediately who it is.

Bella.

“– just have a few minutes with her? I think she’ll want to see me. Please.”

Eliza hesitates, and Renee knows she is running through her acquaintances in her head, trying to figure out where this woman fits into her mother’s life.

“Tell her it’s Marie. Please.”

Finally, Eliza walks over and asks what Renee has already overheard.

“Yes, honey, please let me talk to her alone,” she says. Eliza, still looking confused, nods at the woman and softly shuts the door behind them as she leaves.

Isabella Marie Cullen née Swan, her firstborn daughter, looks like she hasn’t aged a day past twenty, despite the fact that she should be nearing sixty. She is stunning, skin even paler than Renee remembers, her brown eyes looking almost murky, like she is wearing colored contacts.

No wonder Eliza had been confused, trying to figure out how her mother was acquainted with a twenty-year-old supermodel. Renee wonders if Eliza saw any similarity between her own face and her half-sister’s. It's clear to Renee's own eyes, in the soft lines of their jawbones and the shape of their nose.

Bella tears the surgical mask off once they are alone. “I haven’t got any germs to spread,” she says softly. “Hi, Mom.”

Renee tears up, and Bella reaches for a tissue before she even has to extend her hand, gently leaning forward and dabbing at her mother’s eyes. “I missed you,” Renee says, holding Bella's hand against her cheek. It is cold, but it feels good against her fever-flushed skin.

Bella smiles sadly. “Missed you more,” she says, and Renee knows that isn’t true, that no pain will ever compare to a mother grieving for her lost child.

“Is this the end, then?” Renee asks her instead. Phil refuses to be anything but unflaggingly positive about her future, and Renee can’t bring herself to ask Eliza anymore, when her younger daughter tears up every time Renee asks. Renee supposes she probably looks worse with each visit.

Bella nods, looking like she too wants to cry. “I think so, Mom.”

Renee nods. “I thought it must be.” She gestures weakly to the vinyl armchair, and Bella pulls it up close to Renee’s bed and sits with a grace she didn’t have forty years ago. “I’m so happy to see you, honey. One last time.”

“Me, too, Mom.”

Renee thinks with guilt how rarely her daughter had smiled as she’d gotten older. “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better mother to you,” she says, feeling an overwhelming urge to confess her sins. “I did my best, I promise. I didn’t always understand you. But I wanted to.”

Bella smiles again, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “I wasn’t an easy child to understand, Mom. I had to figure myself out on my own. All I ever needed was your love.”

“You had it, sweetheart,” Renee says. “Always.”

Bella squeezes her hand, pressing it gently on Renee’s leg. “I know. I’ve always known I was loved.” She looks hesitant for the first time since she walked into the room. “Even though I couldn’t see you, I’ve looked over you the whole time,” she says finally. “I was always part of your life, in a small way. Yours and Eliza’s and Phil’s.”

“The Little League team,” Renee says suddenly, remembering how Phil had been so upset a few years ago when there had been no money to fund the local junior baseball league anymore. An anonymous donation had come in at the last minute, enough to fund the league for years to come.

Bella nods. “Little things,” she says. “To make your lives easier, better, but not to interfere too much.” Eliza’s surprising scholarship to cover her master’s degree and then two years of internships with the state, Renee realizes, when she and Phil had been prepared to spend half of their savings to get their daughter where she wanted to go. Which had left them enough money to buy a condo in the exact retirement community they had been dreaming of for years.

“Bella, baby, why… How…?” Renee doesn’t know how to ask the question properly. She gestures vaguely at her daughter’s body, her unlined face. She’s had her theories over the years about what has happened to Bella, but she wasn't expecting Bella to look like… this. Is it scientific experimentation, government testing, genetic alteration?

“I am something unnatural,” Bella says slowly. “Something impossible. I paid a high price for this life to be with Edward. I had to leave everyone else I loved behind.”

“And he still…looks…like you do?” Renee asks her. Weariness and something heavier, something more final, start to creep into her bones. She shoves it aside. Not now, when she’s seeing her daughter for the first time in forty years.

“Yes,” Bella says. “We will be like this, unchanged, until we are killed.” She hesitates. “I can offer it to you, Mom. It’s painful, but then you would be like me. But it would have to be like I was to you – cut off entirely. Permanently. From Phil and Eliza and everyone else.”

“I can’t leave them,” Renee says, and she is surprised to find that there is no temptation to take the offer. None at all. “You know I can’t pay that price, baby.”

Bella bites her lip, and Renee realizes that inside the perfect, otherworldly person in front of her, her little girl is still there. “I know, Mom,” she whispers. “But I couldn’t _not_ offer.”

“You have a good life?” Renee asks her, trying to distract her daughter from her pain. She reaches forward to slide her trembling hands through Bella’s soft, dark hair.

Bella smiles softly at the motion, leaning forward so her head is knelt over Renee’s bosom, just as she had as a child, crying when the other students teased her for reading instead of playing on the playground with them. “Yes,” she says simply. “I love Edward more than words can say, and Renesmee and Jacob are so happy together.” Her eyes turn questioning. “Have you?”

Renee thinks of Bella and Eliza, her two beautiful daughters who have changed her life in such distinct ways, her devoted, unwavering love for Phil. Her friends at the retirement community, Heather and Tracey and Liam, and all the kids she’s taught over the years, grown now with school-aged children of their own.

She squeezes Bella’s hand. “The best,” she whispers, and she means it with all her heart.

* * *

“…preceded in death by her parents, Ron and Sherry Higginbotham, and her eldest daughter, Isabella Marie Swan Cullen.”

As Eliza drives to the cemetery for her mother’s graveside service, the pastor’s words during the eulogy rattle around in her brain like loose puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit into place.

She rarely thinks about the half-sister she never met, who died ( _likely_ died; her body was never found) a few years before she was born. There are pictures scattered around her parents’ house of her mom holding a girl who looks so much like Eliza did as a child, Renee looking relaxed and impossibly young.

Eliza loved her mother dearly, but the one thing she certainly never was since Eliza has known her is carefree. Even on vacation or during family game night, Renee could be laughing uproariously, her enjoyment sincere, and still, there would be a tightness around her eyes and lips that never went away.

Scars from losing a child might fade, but they never disappear.

When Eliza was young, she’d had trouble connecting the toddler in the old photos with the almost-grown young woman who had disappeared somewhere in Washington. “Bella didn’t like getting her picture taken as she got older,” her mom told her, something fragile and far-away in her eyes.

Eliza never told her mom that she first got interested in social work because she was looking up ways to heal parents who survived their children’s deaths.

Now she’ll never get to tell her.

When Eliza was young, she learned to fear the feeling of her heart constricting every time her mother slipped and talked about Bella in the present tense – _Bella hates this, Bella loves that_. 

She knows the importance of closure and grieving, and having a funeral with an empty casket certainly didn’t help with that, but it’s been four decades.

Besides, despite how little Eliza knows of what her half-sister was like, one thing Eliza is certain of is that Bella was not cruel, not selfish. If she’d just run away (like Eliza thinks her mother chose to believe for all these years), she’d have come back eventually. Just to let Renee know she was still alive, if nothing else.

But Eliza lives in the real world, and in the real world Bella Swan Cullen is a forty-year-old cold case. She’d been a pretty young woman, and her home in Washington had been near hundreds of square miles of dense forest, perfect for a serial killer to bury her corpse in.

Her young husband had been exonerated, had actually been touring colleges on the East Coast the entire time and had dozens of alibis saying he had been thousands of miles away when Bella disappeared. Bella’s dad, who had died a few years ago, had been a police officer, and _he_ had never tried to press charges against her husband or his family. He’d given up searching for Bella after a couple of years.

No, her older sister is long dead, and Eliza just wishes that her mom had been able to make peace with that fact.

Eliza hopes she’s found it now.

* * *

Her first day back at work, Eliza stares at her computer screen blankly, not seeing the words. She fumbles with the clasp of the small purse clutched in her lap, a nervous habit. She pulled it out of her closet this morning, unable to look at the tote bag she’d filled with the photo albums her mom had requested to see the last couple days of her life.

Eliza wants her mother.

The thought hits her like a blow to her chest, and she almost runs into the single stall restroom down the hall. Pulling some tissues out of her purse, she blows her nose, but doesn’t know why she bothered, when she hasn’t stopped crying.

She turns on the water in the faucet to try to drown out her sobs, but they echo off the tiled bathroom anyway. Her chest feels like it is cracking down the middle.

How is she supposed to live in a world where she can’t talk to her mother every day?

She can’t hold all this pain.

Half an hour later, she’s not out of grief, but it seems that she is out of tears. For now. She bends over to pick up her purse again, and her fingers brush against a stiff envelope.

Frowning, she unfolds the letter. It’s written on precisely pressed paper.

_Eliza,_

_Please accept this as a gift from someone who loved your mother. I knew if I enclosed cash you would spend it on others, as you have done all your life. This is for_ you _. The office will know where to send any additional bills._

Behind the note is another note, written on the letterhead of a clinic in Miami. Eliza almost drops it in the sink when she reads it.

_Ms. Dwyer,_

_I understand you have had difficulties in the past when seeking reproductive care. I truly believe that no one else in the country could give you a better chance at having a child than we can. Please come see us at any time. I will see to your care personally._

Eliza knows the physician's name hand signed at the bottom, recognizes that clinic’s name. It is a place for celebrities and billionaires, for research a decade ahead of its time. They wouldn't have let her make an appointment if she had begged.

No one, literally _no one_ , could have known how Eliza had sought fertility treatments for years, only to be told that after one problem within her body was fixed, another had arisen. Everyone always assumed that since she didn’t desire a romantic partner, she must not want children, either.

But Eliza had given up five years ago and had never told anyone, even her parents. She didn’t have money to keep throwing at the problem, and she hadn't wanted them to spend their own retirement money on their daughter, who had chosen a career she loved with every fiber of her being but one that paid a barely living wage.

Her parents would have hurt for her, and she didn’t want that. Her mother especially already had too much pain in her life.

A different kind of pain fills Eliza from time to time, the yearning for the child she will never have, the grandchildren she will never give her parents.

Even if one of her friends had snooped through her journals or credit card statements or GPS history, they all work in public health or for non-profits. None of them has the money to give her this gift.

For the first time in her life, Eliza finds herself seriously considering the possibility of supernatural intervention.

Inexplicably, Eliza remembers the beautiful girl who had spent half an hour with Renee and come out looking devastated but had still smiled sweetly at Eliza and touched her hand and said, "Thank you, Eliza," and left the way she had come, walking with a graceful stride that Eliza could never emulate.

Eliza had wondered how that girl, who spoke with something so knowing and familiar in her eyes, could have known Renee, could have known Eliza's name, could have caused the beatific smiles her mother had given Eliza and her father for the remaining three days until her death. Eliza will never forget the soft words and gentle voice her mother had spoken to them at the end, every syllable filled with so much love.

In less than an hour, that strange girl had given Eliza’s mother a peace she knows her mother hadn't felt since...

Eliza does drop the letter this time.

* * *

A year later, in a warm, softly furnished room bustling with some of the country's best-trained physicians and nurses, Eliza gives birth to a cooing, quiet baby girl with a tuft of dark brown hair and the same ivory skin that Eliza inherited from her mother.

A week later, Eliza receives an email.

Without hesitation, she agrees to the same promises she now knows her mother once made, and sends back a photo of her newborn daughter.

She tells her sister she has named her Marie.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.


End file.
